Another strange rule at Mandalay Bay

I was at my usual Sunday haunt this afternoon, the home of all the weird, backwards house rules in the city. I thought I already knew them all, but apparently not.

I was at a full (ten players) table. Wheels spinning, not making any money. There was one other table of the same game, which was also full. So I asked for a table change when a seat opened up at the other table. There was no waiting list.

A while later I looked over and noticed an empty seat at the other table. I assumed that the floor person had not noticed it yet. So I approached her and asked if I could move over. She said no, I had to wait until they had somebody to take my seat. I pointed out that she currently had one 10-handed table and one 9-handed table, and that would still be the case if I moved. No table was being left short, and they were still as balanced as they could be. She said she understood, but she couldn't leave my table even one seat short in order to fill the other.

And that's how they ran it. I had to wait until another player came along, so that my seat wouldn't be left empty when I moved to the other game.

Huh?

This is unlike any other table-change procedure I've run across. Assuming that there are no must-move tables going, as long as the tables remain in balance players are usually allowed to move. If there's an odd number, rooms don't care which game has the empty seat; they just don't want to allow a move that would cause there to be an imbalance in the games (i.e., a discrepancy of more than one in the number of players).

I have been through numerous table changes at Mandalay before, and I can't recall this ever having come up previously--I'm sure I would notice and remember, because it's so out of step with the policy everywhere else.

Or, this being a new floor person, maybe she just had her own quirky way of doing things that doesn't reflect the poker room policies.

Either way, it was quite odd, and another example of customer happiness being sacrified in pursuit of enforcement of "we make up our own" rules at Mandalay Bay. I swear they must have a whole team of people hidden in a back room whose only job is making up stupid new rules.